The Monk

by Hallahan, William H. ;

  “Death,” Satan said. “Our weapon against heaven. The end of immortality. And the first victim will be man himself. I say that soon these halls will be teeming with fallen mortals brought here by Death for punishment.” And Satan ordered the fallen to prepare the chambers of hell as a place of pain, torment and torture for sinning mankind. And the fallen soon created forges and weapons and tools and prepared the chambers for man. And they formed themselves into a Congress with committees and subcommittees and they agreed to assume the hideous shapes of man’s nightmares and they made themselves ugly in the eyes of God and they cursed everything beautiful and good and light-filled.

  Satan now announced that he himself would go to Eden to seduce man. But Beelzebub and the others looked on him with doubt for he was weighted with heavy chains. Beelzebub in particular doubted that Satan could seduce this new creature, man. In the Hall of Pandemonium all the fallen in their hideous new countenances began to bicker and quarrel and a great noise of confusion filled that place.

  Satan swelled himself until he seemed to tower over all of his followers. Then as the bickering died away and they all watched him astonished, in a frenzy of rage he burst his chains. The exploding links made a thundering sound that echoed throughout the cosmos. It was audible even in heaven. Pandemonium was stunned. Satan was free.

  “You see before you the power of hatred,” he said. And then alone he set off for Eden. The battle between heaven and hell had been joined.

  Satan was impressed: Eden was compellingly beautiful. The Pishon River and its three companion rivers, the Gihon, Hiddekel and Euphrates, flowed through a lush garden that would bloom forever. When he saw Adam, Satan was disturbed: He had red hair—like Timothy. But Eve was stunning. Lovelier than any angel with a natural grace of movement that awed Satan. He watched her greedily.

  He approached Adam in the form of a serpent.

  “You should eat of the fruit of knowledge,” he said.

  Adam told him that it was forbidden by the Lord. And Satan laughed at him.

  “You are fenced about by rules, Adam. You’re not free. And a life of ignorance is no life at all. Immortality will be a prison. Boredom will drive you mad.

  “You must dare to seize life. Dare to adventure into the unknown. Besides, if the Lord loves you, why does He place such enormous temptations in your path? Because, you may be sure, secretly He wants you to eat the fruit. So break your chains and eat. Great adventurers like you were not meant for security and boring comfort.”

  Adam hung back. But Eve had listened to every word and she talked eagerly to the serpent. In her innocence and lack of knowledge of good and evil, he easily seduced her. And for the first time he discovered passion in his own heart. He was awed by his own feelings of love.

  She asked him to show her his true shape; and he promised her if she would eat the fruit, he would do even more—he would teach her how he was able to assume the shape of many animals.

  He would make her queen of hell.

  And when he showed her his true shape, it was not that of a golden angel. Instead she saw a bulking, powerful, goatlike figure with short horns and two mad eyes, burning like green flame. And she saw his lightning-scarred left leg and wept for it.

  Later she went to Adam and called on him to be a fearless adventurer and dare to explore the stars in heaven. And they ate the fruit.

  The Lord came in a rage and He had Michael drive them out. Now they would know pain and death.

  As they were leaving, Satan whispered to Eve that she should name her firstborn Cain, for Satan himself was to be the father.

  When they were gone, Satan went back to hell. In his hand Satan carried a blue ribbon taken from Eve’s hair. She haunted his memory. He prepared a place in hell for her. And waited for Death to bring her to him. Often he would put the blue ribbon to his nose and inhale the odor of apples.

  The Lord made heaven shake with His anger. He sent Michael to fetch Timothy, who had been languishing in a far corner of heaven with his disgraced followers, awaiting the Lord’s verdict.

  The Lord struggled to compose Himself and suppress the anger He felt over the corruption of Eden. “This is your fault!” He said to Timothy. “Man has been corrupted! He and his descendants will suffer terribly. And you caused it. I want your soul seared by that suffering. You are condemned to watch man through all his history. Since you are the instrument of man’s downfall, you will be the instrument of his salvation. You will wander the earth through all the ages until one day you find a mortal with benevolence great enough to forgive you in the name of man. And only then will you be able to return here to heaven. Only after you are forgiven will mankind’s suffering end. And only then will Satan and his traitors receive their final punishment.”

  Timothy frowned. “How will I know this mortal?”

  “He will have a purple aura, the sign of true benevolence.”

  Timothy turned to go. And the Lord said:

  “Timothy. You must realize that Satan is your adversary. He will do everything in his power to prevent you from finding the mortal with the purple aura.”

  The Lord now stepped out of His pavilion and He looked at that great army of Timothy’s followers. “You shall have your penance too,” he said to them. “The most difficult penance of all. You must sit in limbo and wait for Timothy’s return.”

  Timothy was put on the earth in the form of a magus who would go in the guise of a priest of the religion of the land, sometimes a Hindu monk, sometimes a Christian minister or a Catholic priest, a rabbi, or a Moslem scholar, accompanied always by a bull mastiff.

  When he first trod on the earth, the fallen angel Timothy found a small band of humans, outcasts from the Garden, children of Adam and Eve, nomads guiding their animals and wandering a desert.

  And when Timothy saw Cain, he recognized the mark of Satan, and his heart fell. Already this new race of angels had been corrupted by Satan. And when Timothy went among them, he saw a baby with a purple aura asleep in a tent. But as he hurried toward it, Satan’s hawk appeared and quickly smothered the baby.

  Timothy was stunned. And Satan said to him, “Suffer, Timothy traitor. You will never find a benevolent man alive. Every time a baby with a purple aura is born, my hawk will find him first. You will wander. Forever.”

  PART

  I

  CHAPTER 1

  County Clare, Ireland, Twenty-five Years Ago

  To this day, all up and down the west coast of Ireland, they still talk, over endless cups of tea in cottage kitchens and over pints in pubs at crossroads villages, late at night, about what happened to Kathleen Sullivan Davitt.

  She was nineteen, the bride of Jim Davitt, and they were on holiday from America, visiting his relatives in the Burren of County Clare.

  That day began with an ominous note just after she opened her eyes. At first it was fine. She saw bright Irish sunshine gleaming through windowpanes still wet from the night fog. And she heard the restless wind sprinting off the sea and whistling in the thatched roof over her head, eager to be off. She felt comfortable and safe there under the quilt with Jim next to her, and she inhaled the kitchen odors of the turf fire and frying bacon. She let her eyes rove over the whitewashed walls of the cottage bedroom. A spotless room it was in the home of Aunt Agnes, with handmade rugs on the old wooden floor, an antique washstand and handmade chairs. Even the quilt was handmade and over fifty years old, Aunt Agnes had told her. Ireland was so peaceful.

  She felt the baby stir within her: So he was awake too. His name would be Brendan. One month from today: Welcome to the world, Brendan Timothy Davitt. She had felt life at five months when the baby’s heart had started to beat, and with it had come to her an overwhelming sense of benevolence. The baby was like a little dynamo, purring inside her, generating love.

  The wind rushed at the house again and sighed in the thatching, and when it subsided, she heard a great shriek outside somewhere. It astonished her, it was so grief-filled. She lay very still and listened
. And a moment later she heard it again: a long shriek of pain. She gasped involuntarily. It was like a terrible warning to her.

  “It’s all right,” Jimmy said next to her. He gave her a tight smile. “It’s the shrike. The butcher-bird.”

  She put her hand into his and pulled the quilt over them. “I don’t like it. I wish it would go away.”

  “Just a bird.” He kissed her nose. Charming Jim Davitt, the darling of his family, who could make the world spin at his bidding. She hoped the baby would inherit his personality. “What shall we do today? Would you like to see the old family church?”

  The shrike stabbed his shrill cry into her heart again: a sharp warning, but of what?

  As she dressed, she realized the baby’s position seemed to have dropped. Kathleen wondered if that was normal. She had four full weeks to go and her obstetrician was far away in Brooklyn. Just as she was about to leave for breakfast, she felt a sharp twinge of her abdominal muscles.

  Things became more ominous in the kitchen. Jim’s Aunt Agnes served a small Irish breakfast that would have felled a field hand: coarse Irish oatmeal and cream, eggs and Irish bacon, battercakes and sausage, and soda bread with butter and jam and quantities of strong hot tea. The three of them sat by the peat fire in the sun-bright kitchen and chatted. Aunt Agnes was a small round middle-aged woman with a great store of family history and she soon made Kathleen forget about the shrike.

  Even in her tweed skirt and sweater, Aunt Agnes looked like the retired nurse she was. “I’ve barely touched on the Galway branch of the Davitt family,” she said, pouring from her copious pot.

  Kathleen smiled. “I’ve almost a padful of notes already.”

  “Why don’t we let Jim go out in the fields with the men and I’ll take you to an old church where the Davitts are all buried. We can take some rubbings from headstones.”

  Jim said, “Aunt Agnes has the second sight.”

  “What’s that?” Kathleen asked.

  “Oh, she can read emanations from things. Isn’t that right, Aunt Agnes?”

  “Oh, don’t believe him, Kathleen.”

  “It’s true,” Jim insisted.

  Kathleen was delighted. “Can you really read emanations?”

  “Oh, no, child,” Aunt Agnes answered. “It’s a game we played when we were children. I’m just a good guesser.”

  “She’s more than that,” Jim said. “Here. Read Kathleen’s emanations. Tell her about her baby.” And he held out Kathleen’s bottle of vitamin pills.

  “Oh, am I not after telling you I don’t—” But she’d fisted the small bottle and pressed it against her forehead. “It’s going to be a boy. His name will be Brendan.” And she chuckled again.

  “Be serious, Aunt Agnes,” Jim said.

  Kathleen touched her arm. “Will he be born on my father’s birthday? That’s a month from now, on—”

  “Oh, no, child,” Agnes said. “He’ll be born long before that. He’ll be born in Ireland.” Agnes frowned and glanced once at Kathleen. There was a long pause.

  “What else do you see?” Kathleen asked.

  Agnes shrugged at last and mumbled. “Nothing at all. I told you. ’Tis only a game.” And she put the bottle down as if it were suddenly too hot to hold. She avoided Kathleen’s eyes.

  Later Kathleen and Agnes got into the old Ford Anglia. They were going to drive to the coast past Lisdoonvarna to see the ruins of the church—St. Brendan’s, no less—where many Davitts were buried. As they drove off, Agnes still seemed preoccupied. Kathleen told herself she didn’t believe in the old country folkways.

  There was another strange event awaiting Kathleen Davitt at the church. It was in tumbled ruins, the stained glass long gone from the arched windows, the roof long ago fallen in, the stones all covered with brown lichens and green moss, and at the top of the crumbling walls, gorse bushes were shaking in the sea wind. That wind was pervasive: It soughed sadly in the broken archway of the church entrance and whistled on the edges of the weathered tombstones that were hidden behind crowds of wild daisies and blue cowslips.

  Out on the sea, sitting on the horizon, were the barren purple patches of the Aran Islands.

  Kathleen and Aunt Agnes strolled among the flowers, reading the headstones. Agnes called out the names and recited thumbnail histories. There were Davitts and O’Malleys and Corcorans and Scullys, all ancestors of Jim’s.

  Kathleen looked about the green fields with their whitestone dry walls and gazed far out to sea at the purple smudges where the Arans lay. Then she looked at the old church. “My. It’s lovely even in ruins,” she said.

  Aunt Agnes nodded. “Ireland was once the center of European civilization.” Her fingers touched a stone fallen from the archway. “All cut by the hands of Irish monks.”

  “What’s that?” Kathleen asked.

  Aunt Agnes stood up and looked at the tiny headstones in the separate walled-in section. “Babies,” she said flatly.

  Babies. Kathleen’s eyes looked with dismay: There were so many.

  Inside the church, open to the sunlit sky, Kathleen strolled up the grass-grown aisle to the altar and felt a sudden flood of loneliness. She turned and saw a man standing at the back of the church. He wore a priest’s collar and black dickey and an old tweed jacket. Probably about thirty-five, he had soft, pale-red hair under an Irish cap set on the back of his head. It was his eyes that were the source of the terrible feeling of loneliness. Sea-pale green they were, set in a strong craggy face, weather-tanned with crow’s-feet at the corners. They were the loneliest eyes she had ever seen. She felt he was a stranger there, a wanderer seeking a way home. Beside him stood an enormous bull mastiff.

  Without a sign to her, the priest turned and left, followed by the dog.

  Then the shrike called again, and she backed away from all the loneliness and went outside to Aunt Agnes. “Does that priest belong here?” she asked. “I mean they don’t hold Mass here anymore, do they?”

  “What priest?” Aunt Agnes asked.

  “The one I saw inside.”

  “Where?” She stood up.

  “How could you have missed him? A red-haired priest.”

  Aunt Agnes glanced about, then she looked long and hard into Kathleen’s eyes. “Did he have a big white dog with him?”

  “Yes.”

  Aunt Agnes looked away.

  As they walked back to the car, Kathleen felt haunted by those wanderer’s eyes; they filled her with a sense of homelessness, as homeless as the restless wind that blew through that empty land. She glanced once more at the solemn parade of babies’ headstones and felt another twinge in her abdomen.

  On a large blackthorn shrub by the path, the shrike had left a present: Impaled on a two-inch thorn was a dead field mouse.

  Ireland’s west coast was a place for strangeness anyway. The countryside was largely deserted. Ruined cottages, their thatched roofs long ago fallen in, were everywhere, and wild horses roamed over abandoned fields.

  All day, brilliant sunshine alternated with sudden black clouds that would rise out of the sea and send sharp showers dancing. Then the returning sun would raise tendrils of mist from the stone walls.

  Often a man would be seen far ahead, walking on the curving bending roadways, but when the car caught up, the figure would be gone.

  “Ah, it’s a haunted land,” Aunt Agnes said with a grin. “Strange creatures are always about.”

  Kathleen and Aunt Agnes were back at the cottage for tea about four o’clock, when the priest with the dog appeared again.

  Agnes had brought out an old family Bible full of genealogical material and Kathleen was making notes from it. The only sound came from the steaming kettle. Kathleen was thinking how peaceful it was. The cottage had a magnificent view of Galway Bay.

  In the deep window ledge potted geraniums grew, stunning touches of red in the shining whitewashed room, filled now with sunlight.

  As Kathleen transcribed notes from the Bible, the two women talked of the women
of Ireland and of that flawless Irish skin with a blush of red in both cheeks.

  “Comes from the rain and the moisture,” Aunt Agnes said. “And that’s where the arthritis comes from too. The damp.”

  Kathleen glanced out of the window just as the red-haired priest went by, the large white mastiff at his side. He glanced once at Kathleen and she felt again the painful loneliness.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed to Agnes. “There goes that same priest with the dog.”

  Agnes jumped up and dropped the slice of buttered bread from her hand. “Where?”

  “There. Beyond the old tree.”

  Agnes ran to the window. “Ah, Kathleen,” she said. “You’re drawing a long chalk.”

  “No. I saw him.” Kathleen doubtfully rose and went to the window. There was no one on the roadway—no man, no dog. “He has red hair.” She faltered. “I must have imagined it. But I could have sworn—” She looked at Agnes and knew intuitively that Agnes had seen him too.

  Agnes murmured two words to herself. “The Magus.”

  And that night in a pub not far from the cottage, she received another shock.

  The little bar was packed with relatives. It was an old place in time-dark wainscoting and smoke-dark ceilings. There were the familiar odors of peat and animal dung and cattle and loam and tobacco and stout and lager, and the sound of talk and laughter and the scraping of muddy boot soles on the bare wooden floors.

  They crowded around Jim as though they couldn’t get enough of him. They were telling him all kinds of family stories and gossip, disputing each other’s versions as they went, and he told them stories about their American relatives that made them grin at each other.

  They also talked of banshees and fairies and pookas and laughed at themselves and said they didn’t believe a word of the old stories, but there were always the crossed fingers held behind the back and the tapping on wood, and more than once Kathleen saw one of the women pitch a pinch of salt over her left shoulder into the peat fire.